Robust visual SLAM with compressed image data : A study of ORB-SLAM3 performance under extreme image compression

Sammanfattning: Offloading SLAM to the edge/cloud is now becoming an attractive option to greatly decrease device energy usage. The new SLAM solution involves compressing image data on the device before transmission, allowing a further decrease in the network bandwidth when performing SLAM at the edge/cloud. However, lossy compression affects the quality of images, making image features harder to detect and track during visual SLAM operation, impacting localization accuracy. Current visual SLAM implementations assume that images are non-compressed since SLAM is traditionally executed onboard the device to which a camera is directly connected. This thesis work explores the impact of image compression on the localization accuracy of ORBSLAM3, a representative visual SLAM system, and in what way the ORBSLAM3’s modules for feature detection and matching are affected. Methods are proposed that adapt the image bitrates based on the number of features detected and enhance the image brightness for low-light conditions, plus optimizing the internal parameters in SLAM, to improve the robustness of the overall system to image compression. The experiment results show the detailed influence of the impact brought by compression on ORB-SLAM3 and prove the effectiveness of our methods. Also, integrating these methods yields synergistic improvements. While this thesis work primarily addresses the SLAM system’s front-end, future work can target back-end modifications.